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719. Digital Humanities and Computational Media: At the Interface

12:00 PM–1:15 PM Sunday, Jan 12, 2020

WSCC – Skagit 4

Session Information

Where do digital humanities and computational media studies intersect? What does each offer the other? Is thinking through, or study of, computational media inherently a DH practice?

Presentations

 

1: Why the Digital Humanities Needs a Critical History of Human-Computer Interaction

Michael L. Black, U of Massachusetts, Lowell

@mblack884

Recently, research in digital media studies by Wendy Hui Kyong Chun and Safiya Umoja Noble have called attention to a latent “authoritarian sanction” in Silicon Valley’s innovation rhetoric. Although one would assume humanists are critical of this rhetoric, much of the public promotion and presentation of digital humanities projects adopts many of its tropes. This adoption is especially visible in its engagement with issues of usability and interface design. When considering issues of usability, many digital humanities turn to the field of human-computer interaction, an area of computer science research that has historically framed its work as part of an effort to “humanize” computing and make its processes more readily understandable to non-specialist users. As I will show in this presentation, however, human-computer interaction has historically addressed the cultural and social concerns surrounding computer interfaces by ignoring them: reducing our relationship to them to questions of “universal” cognitive behaviors that are framed as so basic as to exist beneath these complex concerns. In addition to reviewing foundational literature in human-computer interaction, I will focus more directly on Brenda Laurel’s Computers as Theatre (1991). Laurel’s book has proven important to many in digital humanities for developing a theory of interaction out of the history of drama rather than out of artificial intelligence and cognitive science. However, as as I will show, Laurel largely reproduces the strategy of ignoring complex social and cultural concerns but does so through a rhetoric that humanists often respond favorably towards.

BIO:

Michael L. Black is an Assistant Professor of English at the University of Massachusetts Lowell. He researches the history of personal computing, software studies, and internet culture, and is completing a book on the social construction of usability. His work has appeared in Science, Technology, and Human Values, Digital Humanities Quarterly, the International Journal for Humanities and Arts Computing, and Games and Culture.

2: User Experience Research as a Humanist Practice

Zachary Lamm, Social Finance

@zachlamm

In distinguishing Digital Humanities from Computational Media Studies, we are drawing a distinction largely based on methods and materials, and we may find a strong temptation to view the two as existing on linear spectrum: on one end, an computational approach to studying or editing humanist texts utilizing digital tools (DH); on the other, a humanistic approach to analyzing or creating digital media using methods drawn from or inspired by traditional Humanities disciplines (CMS).

I would like to encourage us to think of the distinction between the computational and the humanistic not as a line but as a matrix encompassing not only the humanistic and the scientific but the social scientific. By adding this additional dimension, we can see Digital Humanities and Computational Humanities as part of a larger field of hybrid humanist/computational disciplines that have more closely aligned themselves to the social sciences and business studies, such as Human-Computer Interaction, Information Architecture, Product Design, and User Experience (UX) Research—the field in which I now work. Indeed, I will argue that from its earliest texts, such as Jef Raskin’s The Humane Interface and Donald Norman’s The Design of Everyday Things, work in UX has attempted to bridge the meta-disciplinary gap that separates the Humanities, the Natural Sciences, and the Social Sciences by emphasizing the importance of analyzing the role of the Human within the realm of technology.

In highlighting how in particular methodological and theoretical approaches common in literary studies (especially close reading, queer theory, and psychoanalysis) have been invaluable to my own work as a practicing UX researcher, I will illuminate how fields such as DH, CMS, and UX trouble not only disciplinary boundaries within academe but the larger distinction between the academic/scholarly and the industrial/professional realms. In this era of professional crisis for many PhD’s in literary studies, I want to offer an example of how our specialized skills might be put to use in professional contexts outside the University, in careers that might not at first seem obviously in the wheelhouse of the Humanist.

BIO:

Zach Lamm is Senior UX Researcher at SoFi in San Francisco. He has a PhD in English from Loyola University Chicago and previously taught at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

3: The Infinite Woman as an Infinitely Scrolling Script

Kathleen Schaag, Georgia Inst. of Tech.

@KatieSchaag

My computational poetry platform The Infinite Woman explores the impact of algorithmic processes on narrative voice, gendered language, and poetic form. I am working with a team of Georgia Tech computer science and computational media students (Alayna Panlilio, Ryan Power, Josh Terry, Alex Yang, and Jeffrey Zhang) to develop a web app that computationally performs contemporary poetic techniques of erasure (removing or extracting existing language to reveal patterns) and remix. As an artistic intervention and a feminist critique, the project remixes excerpts from Edison Marshall’s novel The Infinite Woman (1950) and Simone de Beauvoir’s philosophy book The Second Sex (1949). This continuously mutating digital “book” reimagines reading and writing within the time-space of an interactive, open-ended, ephemeral user interface.

The user interface features infinitely scrolling sentences procedurally generated by an n-gram algorithm. Recombining and recontextualizing the two source texts’ vocabulary and syntactic patterns, the algorithm infinitely generates language that attempts to describe and critique an eternal feminine essence. Like social scripts that govern repetitive gendered utterances, the computational code systematically prescribes the form and content of the scrolling sentences. Revealing patterns through iterative permutations, the algorithm stretches the logic of “the infinite woman” to the breaking point. Intentionally resisting the Nielsen Norman Group’s Usability Heuristics, the interface is intended to mildly frustrate the user, simulating the lack of control in gender performativity. Although the user can control the speed of scrolling and the text fidelity (how closely the output sentences align with the syntax of the source texts), they cannot pause the scrolling text, nor can they manually scroll up or down: the flow of language is constant and ephemeral. Users do have some agency within the constraints of the system, though: they can select sentences from the scrolling text to send to a canvas workspace, where they can erase words and rearrange sentences. These user-generated erasure poems are repetitions with a difference, rewriting the ephemeral voice of the infinite woman. Meanwhile, fog slowly erases the screen – materializing “the misty mirror of the eternal feminine” (Beauvoir/Marshall).

BIO:

Kathleen Schaag is a Marion L. Brittain Postdoctoral Fellow in the School of Literature, Media, and Communication at Georgia Tech, where she teaches UX, Agile design, and technical communication for computer science students. She earned her PhD in English at the University of Wisconsin-Madison with a specialization in visual cultures and performance studies. As a consultant at UW DesignLab, she developed curricular materials for emerging “smart media” storytelling genres. She co-founded the Art + Scholarship Mellon Workshop and the Madison Performance Philosophy Collective. Her book project theorizes minoritarian avant-garde closet drama, conceptual art, and digital media.

 

Presider

Victoria E. Szabo, Duke U

BIO:

Victoria Szabo is Research Professor of Visual and Media Studies in the Department of Art, Art History & Visual Studies at Duke University. She was founding Director of Graduate Studies for the PhD program in Computational Media, Arts & Cultures and directs the Digital Humanities Initiative at the John Hope Franklin Humanities Institute. She is also Chair of the ACM SIGGRAPH Digital Arts Community. Her work focuses on the critical and creative affordances of spatial and interactive media for diverse approaches to cultural heritage, urban exploration, and digital media art. She is outgoing Chair of the MLA TC DH Forum.

Session Program Link: https://mla.confex.com/mla/2020/meetingapp.cgi/Session/7743